I recently got an e-newsletter from the Sierra Club with a subject line that told me there are 6,000 things I could do to “pitch in for America.” It was a reminder to me about focusing communications and knowing your audience. I don’t want so many options, and neither do most people. And the pitch is so vague I almost trashed the e-mail without opening it. Turns out, the pitch was for MLK Day service events—it would have been better to let me know that, and direct me to events in my area. Even if I couldn’t volunteer, I might be curious about what my neighbors are doing.
When to Go Negative
“Focus on what you do for them. Show how you solve their problem. Benefits, benefits, benefits.” We—and pretty much every other marketing communications consultant—say that all the time. Perhaps too often, and without enough caveats, recent conversations with a client lead me to believe.
If your audience doesn’t believe they have a problem, for example, they’re unlikely to be moved by your solution. And if you’re trying to create a sense of urgency, you’re unlikely to succeed with a single-minded focus on benefits. Ample research in behavioral economics shows that fear of loss is a much stronger motivator than desire for gain.
What this means: sometimes you have to go negative. Selling water conservation technologies in a rainy region? Your first task is to convince people that wasting water is a problem. Want people to act now? Talk about what they’ll lose if they don’t—in the strongest terms you can support.
You Can’t Please Everyone
Yes, it’s a cliche, but there’s a reason these phrases hang around—we keep needing them.
The biggest challenge we see in producing powerful, motivating communications that connect with their intended audience is the desire to please everyone—internal power centers, partners, staff nitpickers, the CEO’s sister-in-law, often everyone but the intended audience.
We’ve all experienced the hazards of this effort: an excruciating process rife with delays and redos, terminally weakened messaging and presentation, and soporifically vague prose, all adding up to a result that at best no one hates and at worst completely misses its mark. So why do so many keep tilting at an unachievable goal?
At base, there’s the natural desire to please those closest to us—in this case, people we work with and who may hold some sway over our long-term success. And some of those people simply will not be able to get out of their own heads enough to look at a pitch in light of the target audience. But usually there’s also something else at work: a lack of vision on the part of the person leading the project, competing visions if the project is a collaboration, or lack of confidence or executive support if the person with the vision is not the final authority.
These core issues must be dealt with if you’re going to get off the please-everyone treadmill and produce communications that connect. So ask yourself, before producing any communication, Do I have a clear vision for what this should be? Do my collaborators share that vision? Am I willing to stand up for it if I meet resistance, and do I have the support I need?
When the answer to all is yes, move forward. Tell the naysayers you appreciate their comments and will take them under advisement. Tell yourself that communications success is what will really please everyone.
Thinking Outside the Bubble
I was thinking recently about the fact that living and working in San Francisco, I rarely encounter anyone who isn’t voting for Barack Obama and doesn’t find gay marriage utterly uncontroversial—and thus I find unfathomable those distant people who hold passionately opposing opinions.
That’s life inside a bubble—pleasantly reinforcing and comfortable, but challenging when you’re trying to understand and communicate with people living outside of it, doubtless in a bubble of their own. Many sustainability organizations have this problem when communicating with certain target audiences. Technical knowledge, a particular perspective on problems, and immersion in internal achievements are just a few of the transparent walls separating them from their audiences.
They know they need to breach these walls, but they can’t help but filter information about audience perspectives through their own bubble perspective. The result is a not-quite connection.
Thinking outside the bubble is hard to do when you’re still in it. We all need to get out more.
Mind the Gap: Strategy vs. Execution
An organization we work with from time to time undertook a newsletter redesign in-house, with the goal of enhancing their expert credentials by providing high-level information to a key audience. When we saw the result, we were floored: lovely design and fine writing, but the content was unlikely to inspire their target audience and failed to deliver key messages.
The only real surprise here is that we were surprised. We were looking at something we see all the time: the gap between strategy and execution.
We’re always preaching strategy, and many organizations do have a strategy in place. Yet communications still misfire. Informal polling and our own experience indicate that the top reasons include a familiar triumvirate: lack of time, lack of skills and lack of money. Strategies and their associated tactics need to be run through the reality checker with an honest evaluation of what’s needed to deliver on goals.
Strategy Doesn’t End with the Plan
There’s a deeper, less-recognized cause of the strategy-execution gap: a failure to engage in execution as a strategic activity. (This was the problem with the newsletter project.) Executing a big-picture strategy involves myriad strategic decisions about virtually every aspect of a communications tool, yet most organizations see strategy and execution as separate rather than interacting endeavors.
Getting the ‘How’ Right
The strategy may be, “we can reach this audience with a newsletter (or whatever) that does X.” Therein lies the gap—how will your communications tool do X? It’s not always obvious.
Say your strategy is to build credibility by providing expert industry insights. The project lead recruits subject matter experts to write the copy and defers to them on what’s important (hey, they’re the experts). Will that work? Probably not—unless they’re the rare experts who are good writers, know and write to the audience’s knowledge and interests, and can also convey the organization’s work and message. A strong editorial hand is needed to shape the material so it hits those targets, but the project has no editor.
Quality Can Deceive
This kind of breakdown can occur in every aspect of project execution—choice of tool, design, style, content. Professional quality often disguises the problem and compounds it—when results disappoint but there are no obvious flaws, the organization is likely to assume the problem was the strategy and abandon a perfectly good approach. They just don’t see the gap between strategy and execution.
Want to make sure all the resources you devote to developing sound communications strategies pay off? Mind the gap.
